Row me away, boatman I am but a cloud Above a river of woes All alone In the dark night... Without a homeland I have lived forever in exile... Soon our sorrows shall come to an end Look, the day has dawned.

Sung sweetly over the melancholic tones of an Indian flute, these alternately bleak and hopeful lines encapsulate the condition of South Asia’s long-suffering rural proletariat. Penned by revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and paired with the exquisite cinematography of German-born British cameraman Walter Lassally, they make for a memorable opening to Pakistan’s first serious attempt at modernist cinematic realism: Day Shall Dawn (Jago Hua Savera).

Nearly six decades after its original release, AJ Kardar’s newly restored black and white feature about the everyday struggles of East Bengali fisherfolk was recently screened at Cannes. For a new generation of film-makers in Pakistan, the opportunity to review this early engagement with experimental cinema will provide welcome inspiration. Without a national film archive, much of Pakistan’s celluloid heritage has been lost or destroyed.

Pakistani cinema is assumed to have been untouched by the 20th century’s avant-garde film movements. But, with its documentary treatment of village life, labour and capitalist exploitation bearing recognisable traces of socialist realism, Italian neo-realism and Indian parallel cinema, Day Shall Dawn proves otherwise. The intimate involvement of revered poet Faiz – credited with story, lyrics and dialogue – adds gravitas to an already intriguing endeavour.

Faiz’s daughter Salima Hashmi, herself a renowned artist based in Lahore, describes viewing the film at Cannes as an emotional experience. Her father was prevented from attending the premiere at Wardour Street, London, having been jailed in an anti-communist crackdown by General Ayub Khan, who launched a coup shortly before the film was released. It won gold at the Moscow film festival in 1959, appearing briefly on screens before entering hibernation. With the military in power, Faiz went into exile, a pattern that would repeat itself after the coup of 1978. General Zia-ul-Haq’s fiercely conservative programme of Islamicisation and censorship hampered independent film-making throughout the 1980s.

Day Shall Dawn’s reappearance on the big screen has been brought about largely by Anjum Taseer, son of Nauman, the cultured businessman who produced and financially backed the film in its original incarnation. Fired by passions reminiscent of his father’s ambition, Anjum’s tenacious digging led to the re-emergence of prints from storage in France, London and Karachi. Thereafter, screenings at the Three Continents festival in Nantes in 2007 and New York in 2008 followed. In 2009, painstaking restoration was begun, “frame by frame”, says Taseer. “I’m doing it for Pakistan as much as my father.”

With a resurgence of cinemagoing in the country’s rapidly developing cities, perhaps Pakistan will greet the film with greater enthusiasm than it did in 1959. New digital productions such as Zinda Bhaag (2013), Pakistan’s first Oscar entry since Day Shall Dawn, have led to a revival in the national film industry’s fortunes after decades of involution.

And yet the importance of Kardar’s lone feature goes beyond Pakistan. Its cosmopolitan history of production reveals complicated patterns of artistic exchange that belie sharply drawn national or movement-based classifications. Cameraman Lassally played a key role in the transfer of visual ideas between Kardar’s tiny crew and the global independent cinema scene. He and soundman John Fletcher were closely associated with Britain’s influential Free Cinema series: a programme of BFI-funded experimental films (“free” of commercial pressures) presented to the public with a manifesto in 1956.

Kardar’s direction and Lassally’s use of the Arriflex to film a mostly amateur cast in non-studio settings along the banks of the river Meghna are clearly influenced by continental realism’s methods and Free Cinema’s preoccupation with quotidian life at the margins. The minimalist plot concerns a boatman’s aspirations for autonomy in a poverty-stricken world of hunger and exploitative loansharking; sizeable shot lengths result in decelerated narrative pace.

Another key reference point was Satyajit Ray, whose Pather Panchali had made waves following its release in 1955. Lindsay Anderson, Lassally’s friend and collaborator on the Free Cinema programme, exchanged letters and conversations with the Bengali master, who visited London in 1950. More directly, Ray’s assistant director Shanti Chatterji joined Kardar’s crew from Calcutta; Lassally’s haunting portrait of a gaunt elderly woman over the sounds of an ailing villager’s protracted coughing fit is testament to the influence of the Apu Trilogy.

Approaching 90, Lassally, whose Jewish ancestry meant he had to flee Berlin, the city of his birth, for London in the 1930s, recalls his friendship with Kardar fondly from Greece where he now lives. A straight-talking practitioner, he plays down the importance of Free Cinema and steers clear of labels like neo-realism. Just as well: south Asia’s embrace of cinematic modernism calls for more fluid, interactive terms of analysis.

Ray’s work is inspired as much by Jean Renoir’s influence as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), which impressed him greatly. A recently translated 1949 essay by the Pakistani literary critic Hasan Askari refers admiringly to Farrebique, a 1946 documentary about farm life in the Massif Central. Salima Hashmi describes Faiz as deeply inspired by Eisenstein. All of which suggests south Asian film critics and cineastes didn’t simply import western film styles wholesale – they borrowed across movements for their own purposes, melding global ideas with tradition. Day Shall Dawn features a (currently missing) “masala” courtesan dance shot in colour, performed to a lyrical rendition of Faiz’s poetic communist manifesto, No Messiah for Broken Shards. Dancer Rakshi travelled to London during post-production to advise on how to edit it.

London’s role as a hub of artistic exchange for south Asians and their global contemporaries is not surprising given Britain’s historic ties with the Commonwealth. But Day Shall Dawn bridges other east-west divides with equally bloody histories. Drawing on acting, musical, technical and literary talent from both of Pakistan’s then East and West wings in addition to West Bengal, Kardar’s film is a rare collaboration between artists and intellectuals in India, Pakistan and what would later become Bangladesh. For this very reason, it is unlikely to be claimed by officialdom in any of the three countries without hesitation.

Bangladesh might well view Day Shall Dawn, shot in the language of its former oppressor, with ambivalence. Thirteen years after the film was released, the East wing seceded after a war of independence that drew in India and flared into one of the 20th century’s worst genocides. The truncated Pakistani state has yet to confront its past, refusing to apologise for war crimes and failing to accept the violence was triggered by the West wing’s denial of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s democratic mandate to govern.

Curated sensitively, however, screenings of Day Shall Dawn could foster dialogue between pluralist, progressive forces within the two nations. Hashmi recalls Faiz tailoring his dialogue to employ, as much as possible, words common to Urdu, Hindi and Bengali. The plot and setting are inspired by Manik Bandopadhay’s 1930s novel, Padma River Boatman, an important work of Bengali modernist fiction. Proper acknowledgement of its contribution might trigger renewed interest in Bandopadhay’s formidable writings. With Faiz’s poetry, their pro-poor message of justice, solidarity and minimalist riverine aesthetics would not go amiss in today’s subcontinent of bombastic nationalism, chauvinistic religion and unbridled capitalism, oblivious to the impending challenges of climate change.

Two decades after shooting in East Bengal, Lassally returned to Pakistan to work on Jamil Dehlavi’s masterful Blood of Hussain, a political allegory about the tyranny of military dictatorship. Another coup on the eve of its completion saw it banned. The revolutionary “dawn” never came. Pakistan’s brief experience of socialism in the 1970s abruptly ended with the judicial murder of its first democratically elected civilian ruler (after Rahman), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Kardar went onto make a series of important documentaries about Pakistani painters such as Sadequain and Shakir Ali. Tantalisingly, these are thought to lie somewhere among his possessions, together with the missing colour sequence from Day Shall Dawn and at least two other collaborations with Faiz: a documentary on the poet philosopher Iqbal, and an uncut feature, Of Human Happiness. Purportedly a critique of clerical obscurantism, it was shot in Baluchistan – a province in which the Pakistani state’s intermittent military operations against separatists today eerily echo its heavy-handed responses to demands for justice from Dhaka in the lead up to the bloodbath of 1971.

Jago Hua Savera is being shown at SOAS University of London, 14 June; and Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 28 June. Ali Nobil Ahmad is a fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is editor of Cinema in Muslim Societies and co-editor of Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan, both published this year.

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